Michelangelo

Life and the Fate of Mankind

On the morning of September 8, 1889, the readers of the Vossische Zeitung find that the Sunday edition of their newspaper includes a long piece on Michelangelo that one can only call remarkable. For, rather than focusing on either the sculptures or the frescoes that made the Renaissance artist so illustrious, the author of the article has decided to undertake a close reading of some of his poems. Barely mentioning masterpieces like Michelangelo's Moses, the tombs of the Medici, and the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, the article is almost entirely dedicated to the verses that Michelangelo wrote in celebration of beauty, the divine, love, happiness, and, the combination of all of these virtues, his beloved Vittoria Colonna. Most remarkable of all, however, is that rather than highlight the humanism and artistic self-confidence that Michelangelo's art is usually associated with, the author instead underlines the "most overt pessimism" (unverholenste Pessimismus) and "lack of harmony" (Mangel an Harmonie) that gives sharpness to his poetic output (GSG 2, 41, 48). For this reason, Michelangelo is believed to hold a special place within the history of the Renaissance since, whereas Raphael, for instance, can rightfully be called "blind to ugliness" (häßlichkeitsblind), Michelangelo "experienced ugliness so sharply, since it rose up from the background of his ideal of beauty" (GSG 2, 42). The main hypothesis that underlies the article "Michelangelo as a Poet" is therefore that Michelangelo's poetry is situated between two poles, idealization and melancholy, that cannot be separated from each other. "His entire experience of love, to the extent that he has expressed it in a poetic manner," claims the author, "rests on one idea: the opposition between his personality and that of his beloved" (GSG 2, 40).

The article is signed "Georg Simmel," who was at that moment in time a 31-year-old unpaid lecturer in philosophy at the University of Berlin who was making a reputation for himself as a devoted teacher and all-round essayist. Michelangelo's life and art will remain of interest to Simmel until the moment of his death. Still, it will take more than twenty years for his ideas to crystallize in a more systematic text, the essay "Michelangelo: A Chapter on the Metaphysics of Culture" (1910–11). In this text, Simmel does direct his attention to Michelangelo's sculptures and frescoes but maintains the earlier duality between idealization and melancholy. Trying to identify why the Italian artist's work is so characteristic of the Renaissance, he draws attention to a "yearning" (Sehnsucht) that has as its object something "absolute, infinite, unreachable" (GSG 12, 126). Crucial in this regard will be the idea that Michelangelo's works are isolated from any genuine sense of life because they are too much wedded to a longing for stable and eternal forms. In Michelangelo's work, the feeling for what is universal is so overpowering that it cannot come to terms with the contingencies and singularities of this world. As a consequence, the duality of idealization and melancholy is to be complemented with the concepts of Fate and tragedy if one is to understand why Michelangelo's figures express a profound lack of freedom. Since they acquire their particular significance from a reference to the eternity and immutability of a type, Simmel maintains that Michelangelo's works cannot express the infinite potential for change that marks life as such.

Titanism and Loneliness

Simmel's 1910–11 essay on Michelangelo builds on the idea that his figures are marked by a complete reconciliation between body and soul. Despite the expression of the dual nature of every human being, body and soul are "completely interwoven" (absolut durchdrungen) (GSG 12, 114) and thus attain an "existential completion" (existenziale Vollendung) (GSG 12, 125) or a "formal perfection" (formale Vollkommenheit) (GSG 12, 117). This internal completeness is the result of a specific kind of "closure" (Geschlossenheit) that pertains to all of Michelangelo's figures. According to Simmel, these figures have entirely retreated from the external world and they seem oblivious to what goes on around them. It is indeed already clear from looking at the most famous of Michelangelo's artworks that what caught his eye was not the flux and change of the outside world but the very emergence from this seeming chaos and becoming in "a higher life" (ein höheres Leben) (GSG 12, 125). The Virgin Mary's right hand in the Vatican Pietà (1498–99), for instance, or God's left arm in The Creation of Adam (1511) mark places where an external turmoil is held at bay and fully retreats in favor of an internal equilibrium and order that cannot seemingly be interrupted. Simmel describes it as follows: "What seeks to liberate itself and what hinders this liberation, completely falls together in one point, a point where these forces are not differentiated [den Indifferenzpunkt der Kräfte], where the appearance often is held spellbound, suspended in a great moment where the decisive powers of life sublate each other [sich ... gegenseitig aufheben]" (GSG 12, 123). For this reason, Michelangelo's figures are to be termed substantial unities. Their individuation is vouchsafed by the manner in which they lay bare an unchanging quality that underlies their identity and remains identically present within them throughout their lives. As such, the multiplicity of the events, feelings, experiences, moments, and encounters that mark an ordinary existence have, in Michelangelo's figures, wholly retreated in favor of the clear visibility of a continuity and unified life that entirely rests within the human being and remains fully untouched by the contingencies from without. The human being in Michelangelo's art is a substance on its own and is indivisible in itself because what happens to it leaves behind no trace whatsoever within it: it is "unmoved by anything human-fragmentary" and its life is always an "entirety" that originates in "a unifying center" (GSG 12, 117). Such a human being is lacking in nothing and is moved only by what is fully internalized, which gives its "gestures ... a clear logical consequence" and its life the "determination of...